Cinnamon
by robin baby
Summary: Carlisle and Esme both find it difficult to deal with the consequences of her changing. Differs slightly from canon, but not much. Rated just to be safe.
1. The Cliff

**A/N:** This is my version of Carlisle and Esme's story, for now it's beginning. It's a bit different from what I think is generally known, but it just worked out like that in my head.

**Disclaimer:** Sadly, I own nothing (only Pat and Michael, but they're not the interesting part). It all belongs to the wonderful Stephenie Meyer.

I would very much appreciate any kind of feedback! Enjoy!

_ The Cliff _

Her cinnamon hair, weighed down in thick strands by wetness, dirt and the cold, had lost its usual shine to the greyness of an overcast sky and a scattering of tawny sand that had settled with the retreat of the wind-built wave that had left her here.

Her black dress clung to her slender body, as if not wanting to let go, almost like claws on her pale skin where seams met her naked arms and the ankle above her bare left foot, the exposed calf of her right leg.

Small, crimson blossoms dotted the lake-water-saturated sand around her, tiny blossoms with long stems that dissolved into the licking tide. Trickling away, down miniscule waterfalls, one diminutive stone-pool into the next into Superior.

Just a few cuts, scrapes from the rocks below the surface of the turbulent lake, and the soles of her feet were bruised from walking – _running, lingering? _– without shoes on the rough cliff-top, edges like the blades of knives and shards of broken glass, sometimes. How ever those ended up there. A place too eerie to spend a summer night drinking, too hostile to human comfort. But kids, who knew, perhaps they found it thrilling.

Anyway it was not summer.

Anyway she had probably not cared about her feet. Or even felt the cutting and piercing.

Now they leaked blood, crimson and blossoming and drifting away.

Not what had killed her. Broken bones, Michael Burrows suspected, her body destroyed inside, or maybe just not enough air anymore, only flecks of sludge in her lungs and the leaden greyness of the icy lake.

No glimpse of her face. It was shrouded in the heavy cover of her hair that seemed to have draped itself that way, wanting to shield, to protect.

The wind was reckless, though, starting to erode the veil, thread by thread, lifting one hair at a time. Drying, despite the damp air, despite the cold.

He watched the water, whipped up, white foam bubbles dancing, bursting, licking at the slim fingers of her hand, slowly moving the sand, piling it and carrying it off again, until she began to sink into it, between the stones, a wet cold grave beneath a roaring cloud-heavy sky.

Not that he would let the shore swallow her. He glanced up from underneath the brim of his hat, peering through the misty air at the approaching figure of Pat, a dark blur some distance off, snuffling and grunting at the harsh weather.

Neither of them brushed the curtain of hair from her face as they lifted her onto the jute cloth, it would either be too bloody or still to beautiful, both nothing they wanted to look at now. Both would have made their stomachs churn in regret and pity and sadness.

Beauty lost, wasted, either way.

A while later, up at the cliff-top – not the one she jumped from, but a little to the East – they laid her down in the back of the cart, gently as if it mattered.

"My boy's in her class", muttered Michael, "liked her best of all this teachers."

Pat wasn't listening, looking off to the right, scratching his head as if he had something to be embarrassed about, and tipping his hat.

"Dr. Cullen."

His breath hitched for a second, nothing he could do about it. _Damn_, he thought. The same every time. Something about the doctor startled him, startled everyone each time he appeared. Over and over, the first sight, first split second was a small shock.

He looked liked an apparition, approaching them slowly, could have been one for all they knew. Wind, more violent up here, tearing at his scarf and coat and hair, pale skin like alabaster in the diffuse light between the lake and the land and the looming sky. Something about him always hovered right at the edges of the utterly unreal.

He stopped beside the cart, nodding to both men by way of greeting.

"You have the night shift tonight?" Pat asked after a moment of noise-infused silence, awkward for him and Michael, apparently not at all to the doctor.

"Yes", Dr. Cullen answered softly. Too quiet for this weather, actually, but strangely, his voice carried.

"Gonna bring you this one to the morgue", Michael said, tone regretful, yanking his thumb at rough jute cloth and dulled, wet, caramel coloured hair, just a few locks between the folds, as though they were reaching out, trying to find something to hold on to, or to tell them something.

"Who is it?" Dr. Cullen asked, his voice still even and calm.

He had noticed Michael Burrow's cart – the horse hanging his head, unmoving as though he might fend off the stormy gusts and stinging coldness like a that, like a rock – when he had driven by on his way to the hospital.

Michael Burrow's cart on a cliff-top just half an hour before nightfall, and the feeling that something had happened. Enough to make him stop.

He had watched them wrap her in jute and tie strings around her small, slender body, carry her up the winding, rocky path that climbed a steep slope where the cliffs began to subside and crack into a flatter shore.

"Esme Platt", Michael said, yelling above the wind. "Shame, really."

Carlisle frowned. So many people in three centuries, thousands of names and faces, and the stories behind half that number, impossible to remember it all, even for him.

But he had never forgotten Esme Ann Platt.

Columbus, 1911. What ever was she doing here?

Not a coincidence that they would never have run into each other in Ashland.

He only learned it later, but she had not even been there that long. Had taught school until noon and kept to herself at all other times, inhabiting a small house a few miles down the lake shore and a little inland, together with an unborn child and a secret, some story of the past no one knew.

He had been working at the hospital, sometimes daytime, sometimes at night, and had spent the remainder of his time with Edward, who still got bored quickly.

Not a coincidence.

Coincidence it was, though, that she should have come here. Out of all places.

That he should have come here with Edward. Out of all places.

He remembered her, sixteen and laughing, a leg broken but nothing else. Everything else safe and sound.

Cinnamon hair, gentle brown eyes that sparkled, and a cherry smile.

Pat was shaking his head. "Had her baby only a few days ago", he said. "Died yesterday, the boy." Shook his head again, and heaved a sigh that the wind tore from his lips and buried in the dark lake-water. "Can't blame her, I suppose, though a shame it is."

"Pretty thing", Michael mumbled, walking around the cart and climbing onto the seat.

"We'll get her to the morgue now", Pat said, and Carlisle looked at him with his peculiar eyes, always on the verge of being unsettling for a reason that even hours of late night pub discussions had not yet been able to uncover, amber in the fading light, always puzzling and unreadable, like something not of this world.

_Always the same_, Pat thought as he tipped his hat again_. _Every time he saw the doctor, he felt like he was seeing something he had never expected. Every time the doctor's eyes rested on him, he felt like a crystal ball, showing things, he knew not which.

What ever it was about Dr. Cullen. But he liked him.

"Yes, thank you", the doctor finally said, looked away and turned towards his car.

He had almost forgotten about Esme Platt. Broken leg and her cherry smile.

_Quite a coincidence_, he thought. That her life would have wound up leading her here today, a storm-swept cliff on the shore of Lake Superior, miles from the tree she had fallen off ten years ago, laughing despite all and despite the pain, looking at him with something in her hazel eyes that he had never seen before, tucked beneath a myriad of other things, like a tiny poppy flower deep inside a laurel bush.

Nothing to dwell on.

He caught just a fleeting glimpse of Michael and Pat, leaving just when he arrived at the morgue that night, a few minutes before the beginning of his shift.

Only some papers to sign, cause of death probably obvious enough after a fall through 300 feet of bitingly cold air onto a rocky shore.

Esme Platt.

He froze even before his hand had touched the cloth covering her slim body. After 300 years of searching for and finding the balance between life and death, if there was something that Carlisle could tell apart, then it were those two.

And she was not dead.

He could feel the rhythm of Esme's heartbeat even through the faceless fabric, through the stiff, damp coldness of her dress and the ice of her skin, across the inches of sterile, unmoving hospital air between his palm and her body.

Weak and faltering, but there.

He could smell her warm blood, with no storm to diminish the sweetness, it was the same as a decade ago.

_She _ was the same. Esme. The only one who had ever given him trouble to stay true to his commitment. The only one who had ever made human blood seem so very desirable again.

She was the same. Intoxicating. And alive.

A mild frown brushed his forehead, then he carefully pulled away the white cotton.

She was beautiful indeed. A sadder beauty than the despite-it-all jauntiness of her sixteen-year-old self, but more mature as well, distinguished and exquisite. Lips powdery, white skin, dark lashes and elegant lines.

And now?

Coincidence that she should have come here.

Or fate.

He took her cold arm, her left hand, and sat slowly on the edge of the table she rested upon.

Esme, who found nothing more worth living for, breathing for, walking the earth for. Nothing to stay for, nothing worth seeking but the icy hard arms of Lake Superior's shores, blades of stone and the silence of the coldest of the Lakes.

What right did he have to pull her back?

But some things could not be fought. Sometimes, reason was too slow to keep up with intuition, and some things just felt _right_.

Tomorrow, or the day after, her parents would pick up an empty coffin. Neither Michael Burrows not Pat had seen her face. 300 feet where a long fall, and the rocks below were hard an unforgiving.

He left her with Edward that night, returning to the hospital only a few minutes late for his shift.

She would not wake up for hours.

But when she did, and the pain began, he stayed with her the entire time, three days and nights that were tinged with unfamiliar guilt for him and were nothing but a blur of confusion, pain and fear for her.

Then her heart stopped beating and she grew calm, eyes closed and no breath across her lips for a long stretch of time. He left her briefly when Edward got ready to hunt, and returned to find her sitting up, staring at him with huge black, crimson-rimmed eyes and a look of bewilderment on her beautiful face.

For a while, he just stayed a few steps away from her, waiting.

Edward's reaction had been hard to gauge, Carlisle had known as little about this way of changing as anyone else in the world, mythical creature or not.

Peculiarly, it was not easier this time. Maybe because he was wondering less how Esme would react, and more if she would remember as well.

"It is nice meeting you", she said quietly, "after all this time."

He smiled. What a strange thing to say.

He stepped closer, kneeled and took her hand. To her skin, it felt neither cold nor warm, just pleasant, gentle as silk, and reassuring.

She dropped her eyes, briefly, then they started darting around the room. "I am..." Her feathery voice trailed, gaze locking on something between the corner of the room and eternity.

"What?" Carlisle prompted softly, knowing the answer already.

Esme tore her eyes away from whatever she had been seeing, wonder and incomprehension written in them.

"Thirsty."

A smile, barely visible, wistful and with a touch of detachment, appeared on his lips. "I thought so."

He rose and walked slowly to the second door in the room, stopped there, but did not open it. He looked at her, waiting, so she followed.

He swung the door open for her, an elegant gesture inviting her to enter. Her black eyes, puzzled, searched his face for a moment, torn between distraction and curiosity, but eventually she complied and walked into the dark room.

Carlisle stayed outside, and closed the door.

Edward kept him company while he waited, asking questions, listening to questions. It all seemed like an experiment still, although it was the second time now.

He was pleased it had worked. Worried, that something might go wrong. You never know. And it was up to her, too.

He found her on the floor, kneeling, arms on her thighs, palms turned towards the ceiling. Blood on her skin and in her hair, on her dress, the carpet and the hazel – colour of her living eyes – fur of the deer. Not yet dried, fresh and crimson.

She had cried the last tears that her former life had left her body, over the deer she had killed.

Small, fragile, dead eyes wide in horror. The green glade in the forest long forgotten.

She looked up when she heard him approach, wet trails on her face drying, eyes golden and wide, frightened.

"What have you done to me?" she whispered.

He came closer slowly, and crouched beside her again, holding out a hand. She stared at it mutely, unmoving for a moment. If he had not known better, he would have said she could not decide whether to take or bite it.

She took it, a peculiar expression brushing her delicate face as their fingers touched.

"They're not cold now", she said after a while.

Carlisle smiled, surprised and pleased that she would remember his hands ten years back through time, growing-up and across two states.

"They're just as cold", he answered quietly, "only yours are the same now."

Esme stared at their touching hand for a long while, as though something mesmerized her, then she suddenly dropped hers into her lap and looked up at him. "What happens now?"

He gave her another smile, pained this time, and rose, walking away from her to a tall window.

"You're free to go, of course", he said after a long time, meeting her eyes again, the same sad smile whispering around the corners of his mouth. "This is not your prison."

"Not in more ways than one", she murmured.

**I love reviews, so feel free! ;)  
Thanks for reading!**


	2. The Cliff, Again

**A/N:** Here goes the second chapter! I know you can't exactly call this 'falling in love "quickly and easily"', as it's supposed to have happened between Carlisle and Esme, but what can I say? Quickly and easily is less fun to write!

Thank you again to those who reviewed!

And now enjoy!

_The Cliff, Again_

"It won't work, you know."

Her eyes narrowed a bit, but otherwise she didn't move. She didn't care that he had found her or what he was saying, the word didn't even make sense to her. All she cared about was this cliff, all her thoughts, her entire being had narrowed down to this one place, and she fought to keep it so. She couldn't let anything interfere, wouldn't. Least of all him, not again.

She balled her hands into tight, hard fists and stared into the darkness at her feet, that seemed to be made of the rushing and howling sound of wind and water. It grew louder and louder in her ears, until it seemed to grow tendrils and wings that reached out to envelop her, soft and inviting and oddly familiar.

But the silence behind her, _his_ silence cut through it all. Amazing, how something that was so frail and infinitesimal against the backdrop of such noise, could be so inescapably present. She tried to ignore, tried to hide in the chaos around her, but somehow, the spell had cracked and then it broke.

She blinked and felt as if the liberating darkness plunged downwards, the same 300 feet that Esme had fallen through herself, leaving behind dusk, brighter than she would have liked it.

"You saved me twice", Esme said quietly, "for the first time I thank you, the second I didn't want, and I beg you don't do it a third time." Her voice was tense, and pleading.

"No", Carlisle said slowly, with that peculiar hint of sadness that she had heard so often already in many of the things he had said to her over the last three days, "there are indeed few things that you need saving from now, Esme." He paused, and she frowned into the depth.

"It won't work", he said again. "Nothing will. Trust me, I know. I tried."

For some reason, she turned around.

He was leaning against a rock that weather and time seemed to have forgotten there on the cliff, watching her with his golden eyes, a regretful expression on his pale face and all that mesmerizing beauty that had stunned her at sixteen and still caught her off guard now, somehow piercing through the mist of her desperation.

"Why?"

He shrugged lightly and smiled. "I guess death does make people unbreakable. Almost."

Another frown, as if she thought his answer didn't make much sense, and she was silent for a few moments.

Odd, how calm she seemed. Carlisle had seen enough newborn vampires to know that this was uncommon. And she had a lot more than bloodlust to battle. But maybe that was the explanation. Maybe the pain she had brought with her from her human life was just that much stronger than her desire to kill.

Maybe she was paralyzed.

Standing not a step away from the edge of the cliff, she looked like a paper statue, unstable and constantly on the verge of being pulled over the ledge by some invisible strings rising up from the shore below, attached to her body like to a kite. Her crimson eyes confused and afraid.

Like she really needed to be saved from everything, everything that had been her world once and everything that was her world now.

Only that wasn't possible anymore.

What ever had he been thinking.

"Why did you try?" The question seemed out of context for a moment, until he had found the lose end of their conversation again, somewhere amidst the regret that was becoming a constant companion.

It surprised him, too.

Most of all, however, he wished she hadn't asked.

After all the accusation and pain he had seen in her eyes over the past days and nights, it somehow was this question that made him wonder if the damage he had done might be too much to fix.

For the first time since she had turned around, he dropped his gaze from her face.

He knew he remained silent for too long. As if he had to think about it. When the answer was the simplest in the world.

"I didn't want to be what I am", he finally said, quietly and evenly, and Esme didn't know him well enough to hear how much it tortured him to say the words out loud. How could he ever justify what he had done?

Well, but that answer was simple, too. It wasn't justifiable, and it was her right not to be appeased.

"Then why", she asked, the calm surface finally crumbling, her voice rising as if she indeed did have to yell to be heard over the howling wind, "why did you make me the same?" She halted herself, visibly struggling to regain some composure. Her hands were balled into fists again, held stiffly at her sides, and she turned a bit, looking out at the horizon – an eerily luminous stretch of anthracite that was rapidly loosing its glow to the descending night – as if she could draw some kind of strength from there.

"Didn't you know –" she began, but broke off again, unable to finish.

He knew what she wanted to say, though. Her son, her newborn child, taken from her only days after he had come into the world, and her despair over the loss.

"I knew", he merely said.

This time, she spun around, eyes blazing. Her hands relaxed for a split second, then they were fists again. "Edward told me you would never turn someone who had a choice", she said, forcefully, and always with that edge of despair that seemed to line everything she said or did or thought.

Carlisle nodded, meeting her eyes again. She was right, every word she said tonight, and had said ever since her new life had begun, was and had been true.

Everything she would say would be true.

"I jumped off this cliff." She pointed behind her, but it looked as though she were reaching out towards the blackening sky, and the twines of the 300-feet-deep darkness.

"That _was_ my choice."

"I know."

Her arm dropped to her side again, suddenly lifeless, as if she couldn't even make a fist anymore. She didn't understand. Just couldn't find a reason that would explain, that would help her consolidate the image that she had of him, had had for such a long time, the way he treated her and those gentle, often sad eyes, and what he had done to her.

Maybe, he thought, Esme, the woman that seemed like an angel to him, was really an avenging angel.  
Maybe he _had_ been wrong, and Edward right, and there was no forgiveness. He had changed Esme despite all he had known, and against better judgement, because he had not been able to resist her. Or hadn't bothered to resist. No one had asked him to save her, like Elizabeth Masen had asked for her son to be saved.

But Esme had asked not be saved. Unmistakably. He had ignored it, and here she was, speaking out loud everything he had buried in silence, turned away from, hidden from.

Maybe she was here to remind him that no excuse had ever been good enough, and certainly not his own loneliness.

Esme stared at him mutely for a long while, the wind tearing at her hair, her clothes, her body, as if it were trying to nudge her further towards the ledge and pull her away from it at the same time.

And then, slowly, she closed her eyes, and squeezed them shut, wishing for the rushing and howling noises to wipe out reality again, to infuse her with the darkness that she had been so close to once already, almost been part of.

And she almost forgot about Carlisle's presence.

She thought of Daniel, the little angel she had not been allowed to keep, and did forget about it.

But his words lingered, they stayed with here even in the sounds of the wind and the tumultuous lake. _Nothing will._

She didn't know how many times throughout her childhood and adolescence she had heard her mother say how nothing was set in stone. She had believed it, always.

_Nothing is set in stone. _

Suddenly, everything was.

_There is always a way._

Suddenly, there was none. No way out, she would never escape again.

"You doomed me", she whispered, feeling how the wind took the words, carrying them out into the pitch black night that would be her existence now.

**Let me know what you think!**


	3. In Time

**A/N: **Yay, it's finished! This one took me forever, and I can't say I'm satisfied, but messing about endlessly with the stuff usually doesn't make it better and only gets my brain in knots, so I figured I'd just call it a day.

I apologize for the long delay, in case anyone minded.

Thanks a lot to wmlaw for the review!!

And now enjoy!

...

_It will pass_

_Things will change_

_But you don't want to hear that_

_- Song for Catherine_, K's Choice -

_In Time_

She wasn't paying much attention to the sky, or to anything else, for that matter. Night was falling, like someone had tipped a jar of ink into a bowl of grey sea water. It sank quietly, and slowly, erasing and silencing the world as it went.

The colours of the forest, black-brown and dark emerald, light green in places, all turned blurry, as though the mist were washing them out. They leaked out of the shapes they belonged to, tress and moss and shrubs, and mixed, gradually tingeing everything shades of grey, anthracite to charcoal.

That was good enough to look at for her. Indistinct and dismal, colourless and dark.

She didn't feel the dampness anymore, either. Neither that of the grass nor the soil underneath it nor the air.

She even hardly heard him approach. Certainly would have missed it, had she still been human, but the frightening sharpness of her senses made some things impossible to miss.

He all but plopped down on the grass beside her, looking graceful even as he did something so ungraceful. He seemed perfectly at ease, apparently oblivious to her mood, but Esme was certain he was anything but that.

She didn't move, didn't even turn her head, her mind too tired to respond to anything. It was dizzy from twirling in circles for a small eternity, ever more narrowing circles that lead her past the same thoughts and images over and over again, and slowly focussed on the one thing that she was certain of right now: her pain.

She didn't feel like she could just skip out of those circles, and she didn't want to.

Edward had to know that just as well, but he didn't appear to mind, either. His eyes swept the forest for a moment, as though he wanted to see what it was that held her attention.

"How long are you planning to stay out here?" he asked then, his voice so light, it was almost startling in the heaviness of this dusk.

And the question itself confused her, too. She hadn't wasted a thought on that.

"I don't know", she replied after a while, quietly, her voice somewhat subdued, as though the misty air had permeated it, too.

"You could also lock yourself up in your room, you know?" Edward pointed out, sounding almost amused.

Finally, Esme looked at him, partly out of surprise. _Your room?_ Edward smirked, no doubt hearing her reaction. He also heard her response to the suggestion, though. Her refusal. She didn't want to be inside.

She wanted to run away, to take Carlisle at his word, _You're free to leave, of course,_ and scared to leave as well.

So she sat here, at the edge of the forest behind the garden, the edge between leaving and not daring, suspended, both unable and unwilling to move.

"Trust me," Edward said, voice softer, more solemn, "it'll be harder elsewhere."

She leaned her head against the tree that she had been sitting under for … well, she wasn't sure how long. A day, two perhaps.

Although she was neither in need of the shelter nor of support. It felt odd not to grow physically tired anymore, not to be bothered by temperature or the weather.

"Are you speaking from experience?"

He shook his head. "No, I've always been with Carlisle." Esme turned her head away again and smiled, an empty smile, habitual curving of her lips, saying _Then how would you know?_

"I've seen a great deal of his memories", Edward replied.

Her eyes turned thoughtful. Briefly, she wondered what those memories were like, of what exactly they were that mentioning them would add that sombre tinge to Edward's voice

"Tell me about elsewhere, then."

Maybe his stories would ease the tearing inside her a bit, the constant pulling away from and towards this place, that house.

Maybe she was just being polite.

The ever-blowing wind shook the treetops above them and sent a fine shower earthwards. With a movement so quick that it startled even Esme, Edward caught something in mid-air, his fingers curling around it before she could see what it was. He just held it there for a while, apparently lost in thought, but then it appeared in between his white fingers again as he began to play with it absent-mindedly as he considered her request.

The dark brown scale of a pine cone, wearing a single white dot like a jewel.

"We're not of our nature good creatures, Esme", he began eventually, a lot of the lightness with which he had arrived, gone from his voice. "We're predators. We kill, for survival, and for territory. Not much different from animals, and like it is with them, cruelty is an innate trait in us. There are rare exceptions, but even them I wouldn't call…", he inclined his head, searching for the right expression, "…merciful", he decided.

"That's how it is elsewhere."

He looked at her, and found wide, poppy-red eyes and frozen features. Her thoughts were turbulent, whirling around his words like birds frantically looking for a place to land, something sturdy enough to support and familiar enough to comfort.

Maybe, he thought, Carlisle was right. She was submerged in her pain, encapsulated so unreachably that her own new nature had barely registered with her. She didn't think about the things Carlisle had already told her during her changing, they weren't important to her now. There was no space for them inside of her.

Edward bit his lip, feeling a tinge of regret.

Carlisle hadn't wanted to bother her any more with what she didn't want to, and couldn't, deal with for the time being, and perhaps it would have been a better idea to abide by that decision as well. Well, it usually was.

Only at the moment, Edward found it hard to tell if Carlisle was simply being reasonable, or rather feeling guilty.

But then Esme's thoughts calmed, maybe they had found something solid among the things he had said after all. She met Edward's gaze again.

"How come you're different?" she asked eventually.

He shrugged. "Carlisle," he said, and somehow the single word sounded like a transliteration for a wealth of emotions. And as if it explained everything. Only for Esme, it didn't.

Her companion chuckled.

"He has a gift for doing things that are supposed to be impossible", he told her, and somehow captured her attention a bit more firmly than before, not so much with the words he chose than with the way he said them. With reverence, and a certain softness.

"Like not feeding off human blood", he went on, and then something made his lips curve into a grin, and he lightly shook his head. "Or being a surgeon, out of all things."

They were both silent for a while, Edward apparently lost in thought, Esme wondering why he was here, telling her those things. Trying to find out if they meant anything to her.

"A gift?" she repeated, maybe because that really bewildered her, maybe because she was reminded of Edward's own peculiar ability to hear thoughts, and because that, despite all, was the least frightening puzzle of this existence.

"Carlisle wouldn't call it that", Edward replied. "He'd say it were necessities. Things he needed to do because otherwise he couldn't have lived with himself."

Esme frowned. Why, then, she wondered for the hundredth time, had he changed her, too?

"Not just like that, if that's what you're thinking", Edward said quietly. He would have liked to hear her response to that, to know if it _was_ what she was thinking, but it was almost as if she deliberately didn't dwell on his remark.

"Why are you telling me all this?" she asked instead, sounding weary.

He shrugged. "I thought perhaps I could help." Esme almost smiled, but then it turned into a shaking of her head and she looked away.

"I know", Edward went on, "Carlisle said that too." He sighed and ran a hand through his bronze hair. "Perhaps you're both right, and our stories _are_ too different. You're not struggling with what we are or even how we live, you're grieving." He paused, his eyes dropping and focussing on his pine scale again, thoughtfully. "I suppose I can't give you any advice there after all."

She was quiet for a moment. "Didn't you leave anyone behind?" she asked then.

He shook his head. "Not really. My parents died before I was changed, and most of my friends, too."

"I'm sorry", and she meant it.

Edward pursed his lips and reached over to her, holding out the pine scale. Purely on impulse, Esme took it. She stared at it for a while, remembering the many times that her father had brought her something after a day of working in the forest behind their house. A piece of peculiarly shaped wood, a handful of beechnuts because she liked their shape, or a bit of bark that was fragrant with the smell of forest earth and resin. Whatever he had brought her, it had always been warm from having been carried in his palm, or stowed away in the pocket of his pants.

The scale was cool, like it had never been touched.

Edward suddenly chuckled. "Well, hard to tell if you need to be, isn't it?" He paused thoughtfully. "It's been a long time anyway", he added after a while, and then something seemed to cross his mind. "So … maybe we're not that different after all?" He looked at her, eyebrows raised, as though waiting for an answer, or at least some kind of reaction to his finding.

Esme said nothing. She wouldn't have known what. To her, he was right and wrong at the same time.

"I may have been fighting other demons when I was as young as you are now, but my mother died the night that Carlisle changed me. I missed her too, Esme. But the pain fades with time."

She knew what he was thinking, for once she did. She was old enough, had seen enough to know that it was true, and time healed many wounds. For this one, however, she was certain that even a million eternities could never be enough.

"I believe you", Edward said, and he did. He believed that nothing was worse for a mother than losing her child. "But pain isn't forever. It'll get better, and then, perhaps, you'll see it the way I do. I was dying when I didn't want to, and then I got a second chance."

The fluid movement of her fingers stopped.

"And how would that make sense?" she whispered, voice strained, as though she were fighting to keep it so low only so she wouldn't shout. "I _wanted _to die. How is this a second chance, what would I want one at?"

She gave him the scale back and locked her arms tightly around her body, as though the coldness in the damp air were registering with her.

"What about happiness?"

_Daniel_ was my happiness."

Even to Edward's ears, the last words almost dissolved in the wind. They sounded as though they were the last of her strength, and as they faded into the darkness of the forest, they pulled her with them, into the black and green-brown shapelessness, or maybe they let the falling night into her head, her entire body. She seemed perfectly absent, her thoughts so far away from this place and time that everything around her disappeared into non-existence.

Edward watched her in silence for a long while, trying to follow her through the maze and the undergrowth, thorns and sharp, bleak wood, that were her mind. It was difficult, though, as if she were always running, fleeing like someone pursued, a flicker of cinnamon, alabaster and black, constantly on the brink of being to far away or too hidden for his eyes to see.

Hard to tell what she was thinking. Maybe she was lost in her emotions, lost in how everything, every moment of every day of timelessness felt to her right now, lost beyond any concrete thought.

So maybe their stories were too different for Edward to be able to help her after all.

Maybe it was true, and she was struggling with a pain that didn't differentiate between human and immortal, didn't change with the overcoming of death or diminish in the face of a new beginning.

And it was nothing Edward knew, or Carlisle.

She couldn't let it go, but she didn't want to, either. Now that she wouldn't have death, she at least wanted that maze of thorns that had invaded and filled every corner of her consciousness, in a way that Edward couldn't comprehend. It was the embodiment of her pain, and she didn't want it to retreat even a fraction, not a single shoot to shrivel up.

Suddenly, her thoughts changed direction and she shook hear head. "I don't want to hear any more. Why are you telling me all of this?", she asked again, sounding as though she were truly tired.

"Because Carlisle wouldn't", Edward replied. "He thinks that you have a right to your pain, and a right to be angry."

She smiled vaguely. "And you don't agree?"

"Of course I do. But I also think that that isn't everything there'll ever be for you." He paused, but when she didn't react, he continued: "This _is_ a new beginning, you know? Whether you like it or not. There wouldn't be anything to go back to, anyway."

She shook her head jerkily, understanding what he meant, and trying to deny it. Only she couldn't. "I know", she said, desperation lacing through her voice. "I know that neither my mortality nor my death would have brought Daniel back. I didn't –"

"Yes", Edward interrupted, "I know. You jumped so everything would end. But was that what you _wanted_?"

She stared ahead again, into the pitch black forest, the trees invisible to human eyes now, the darkness billowing out from between them in slow bubbles of silence.

"Or was it just the only possibility you thought there was?"

_**TBC**_

Thanks a lot for reading, and now go make my day and review!!

_In your dreams, in your bed  
In everyone and in your head  
On the wall, it ain't white  
In every letter that you write_

_In the way people talk  
In the shape of stones and rocks  
He's your hero, he's your god  
He listens to this song and nods_

_In a voice, in a sound  
When you're happy, when you're down  
It will pass, things will change  
But you don't want to hear that_

_In the scent of the air  
On the clothes that people wear  
You feel love, so does he  
And he's telling you 'I'm here'  
I'm here  
He's here_

_- Song for Catherine, _K's Choice -


	4. Wood and Paintings

**A/N: **I know I apologized last time for taking so long to come up with a new chap … well, it took me _really_ long this time, and I apologize again to anyone who has been waiting! I'll put at least some of the blame on the Latin class I had to take this semester. It was time-consuming.

Anyway, I do hope you'll like the new chap after all this time!

Thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far, and a great many thanks to my friend who betaed this chapter!

… and, you know: comments are love!! Enjoy!

.

_Mesmerized by your lust for life_

_Untainted by the years._

~ Julian Davis – _I Can Still Remember You _~

_Wood and Paintings_

She stayed on her small island of almost-leaving until she knew she had to move _somehow,_ or else the rain and the moss and the cold earth would never let her up again.

Her clothes were soaked with water, her skin was, her flesh, even her bones. It was seeping through her into the ground, through her cinnamon hair and the fibers of her body, whatever that was made of now. She was like ancient rock, formed, torn apart, cracked and compressed again, and now water from the sky was flowing through her as if she were part of _everything_ already, of something eternal.

She jumped a little, pieces of scenery tumbling into the blankness of her absent-mindedness, green, black and brown, as she realized that she _was_ part of something eternal. It wasn't just a metaphor anymore.

She frowned and began to move, to stand up. If she didn't, the rain would weigh her down more and more, then, when winter came, she would be locked up in a shell of frozen fabric, and heaped with snow, and by the time spring came, she would be just another rock on the edge of this forest, forever unable to move of her own accord.

Briefly, she imagined herself in this spot, in winter, in spring, in a decade, a century, with the world changing, being transformed into something still unimaginable to her, some utopia or dystopia, she imagined herself being moved someplace else, out of the way of a new building or a street, being thrown into the water and slowly turning into bone-white sand.

Something about this notion didn't please her, and she grimaced.

Well, she was standing upright now. What next?

She stared into the forest, and tried to recall a map that had shown her, or a trip perhaps that had taken her to the other side of it. She tried to remember what was there.

And then she thought that it didn't matter. A town, the sea, a desert, Heaven. It didn't matter because, whatever place there was, she didn't want to go there. She was tired of searching for new places, new beginnings, new lives. It hadn't worked so well last time, had it?

So she turned around and walked across the meadow towards the house, pulling her wet hair back from her face irritably. The rain annoyed her. Incessant tap, tap, tap against her skin, like something stubborn and nagging that just wouldn't leave you alone for the love of God.

She scrunched up her face as water trickled into her eyes. _Go away,_ she thought.

All through the days of her self-chosen exile, the patio door had been open, just wide enough for her to slip through. It was open still.

For a brief moment, her good manners kicked in and pointed meaningfully down at the hem of her dress, dripping, and her bare feet, muddy and wet. She pursed her lips. _Go away, too._

What surprised her, was the warmth. She hadn't thought that she would ever be able to feel it again. But she did.

It enveloped her as soon as she had shut the door, like a blanket that had been waiting by the fireplace, waiting to wrap itself fully around her. It smelled of wood – dry wood, stained or varnished, old and saturated with stories, memories, days and nights. It whispered, sometimes it couldn't quite suppress a groan, it giggled.

She listened, transfixed, for a while. She had become so accustomed to the sound of the woods, the stormy sky with its clouds, its rain and its thunder, the wind in the trees, creaking branches, crying or creeping animals, the rustle of the grass, that the quietness, the softness of this house almost overwhelmed her.

The smells, too. No earthy, strong forest ground, resin, rotting plants, clean rain and smoke.  
Dry, warm wood, linen and cotton, leather, paper, soap.

And the colors. There was still dark green, still dark brown wood. But it was all calm and steady, not windswept and rain-lashed. It was all smiling at her, looking cozy where it sat.

There was red, too, deep red and yellow, creamy white. Gold and silver, where letters had been minted into the spines of books.

It all sounded, smelled, looked comfortable and warm. She looked about herself somewhat helplessly for a few moments. She didn't quite know what to make of this. Whether to be glad that something – maybe the amiable wood and the yellow – told her she could feel at home here. Or not.

Why not? She frowned. _Because._

Because she was some mythical creature. A creature trapped in a cage whose bars were wrought of a memory, cemented in time and perfectly resistant to anything and everything that might break through your ordinary – or even less ordinary – metal.

Because she had nowhere to go anymore. In more senses than one.

She moved, for some reason, and felt the fabric of her dress protest. _No_, it said, _too heavy._ Still too heavy? Despite a small lake on the wooden floor?

Esme gathered up the skirt a little and decided that she couldn't stay in these clothes, not even when the danger of catching a cold was pretty low.

So she climbed the stairs and, being with another half-open door, found her room. _Her room_. How odd, she thought.

She didn't pay much attention to her surroundings while she changed and then raked a brush through her wet, tousled hair. It was the color of cherry wood now, dark with rainwater.

When she had out the brush down again, she listened. First, to the wood. For a few moments, she tried to decipher something, but maybe it was a language she didn't understand. She wondered how old the house was.

Then, to the familiar outdoors sounds. Rain, wind, life.

Then, to the silence. It was nestled in between all the other things like something soft and serene, something white and light as a breeze. It wasn't easy to find among all the whispering, creaking and rushing, but quite all-encompassing all the same.

It peered up at her and seemed to wonder what to do. Unsettle her or comfort her?

Esme didn't await the decision. She didn't much care for either of the options.

Instead, she left _her room_ again, closing the door quietly, as if there was someone there she might otherwise disturb. As far as she could tell, she was alone.

For a handful of moments, she hesitated, unsure what to do now that she was here, not in her room but in no other room, either. In between, again.

That was when she suddenly noticed the cross. Dark wood, hanging on the wall to her right just before the stairs began. How had she missed that before? It was a size that seemed unlikely to be overlooked.

Slowly, she wandered over to stand in front of it. She allowed herself a brief, sweeping examination and tried not to look too closely. Her love of art of any kind soon got the better of her, though.

And it was whispering, too. Between the breaths of old age, she thought she heard words.

Silly wood. Talkative.

She let her eyes follow the lines of the intricate carvings, tripping slightly at each pinpoint hole that a hungry woodworm had left, trying not to slip and tumble into the crevices torn open by time and the loss of moisture.

A little bit against her own will and stubbornness, she began picking her way through the questions of leaving or staying, the images of cliffs and her son, bits of confusion and shards of fear, rummaging for her knowledge about wood carving and ecclesial art that she had had as a human.

"You're not going to ask me why looking at it doesn't hurt you, are you?"

She spun around, too startled to feel irritation for a moment. She wondered how she could have been caught off guard when her senses of late seemed to be sharp enough to hear dead wood breathe.

Somehow, though, that contemplation got lost like sand dwindling away through a crack that had suddenly appeared. In her case, that crack lead to the summer of 1911.

She blinked a couple of times and tried to remember everything she had learned in the last few weeks, her pain, her damnation, the blame, but none of it would stick. It slipped off his perfect face and gentle eyes like silk, pooling at his feet and peering up at her inquiringly. _What now?_ it asked. _Where to?_

Esme frowned at it and turned around again. She took a deep breath.

"It seems like most of the myths aren't exactly true," she said, glad to find that she didn't sound too flustered.

"None at all that I can think of," Carlisle replied with his quiet, calm voice. He paused for a few moments, watching her study the cross. It was hard to guess how she felt. She looked composed, her fingers lightly interlinked behind her back, her shoulders straight but not exactly tense, damp hair falling past her shoulder blades. Only her eyes, ruby red, had still been restless. She still wanted to flee.

"Are you religious?" she suddenly asked, eyes travelling over the cross again to have something to do.

The question surprised him a bit, although it probably surprised her more. _Why am I asking this?_

Carlisle thought about it for a moment. Difficult subject. If Edward were there, her question would have triggered hours of discussion.

"I don't know if that's the right word," he eventually replied.

She looked at him over her shoulder. "Then why do you have it?"

He gave her a vague smile, like the flapping of a wing. "Nostalgia, I guess," he said. "My father made it."

Her eyebrows went up, then she looked back at the cross. _Really._

"It looks …" she searched for the right word, and eventually settled on the most obvious one, "old."

Carlisle laughed, softly, quietly. She liked his laughter.

"We don't age," he pointed out, and Esme frowned at the item of interest. She tried to guess how old exactly it was.

"Come on," Carlilse said into her calculations. She got lost somewhere between architectural epochs and their features and glanced at him, question in her eyes. "I'll show you – if you want." He waited for just a moment, then he turned and went into the room behind him, leaving the door open so she could decide whether or not to follow.

Esme hesitated for a moment, wondering vaguely how he intended to _show_ her the age of two pieces of wood, if that was what he was referring to, but somehow she couldn't find a reason to refuse. So she followed. Into a study, as it turned out.

More wood, more books. Countless books, in fact. Some had glossy covers, others were bound in leather, letters minted into the material and accentuated in black, gold or silver, some seemed to bear no title at all. There seemed to be a confusion of topics, novels and textbooks about everything. Some titles were written in languages she didn't know.

And paintings. As soon as she laid eyes on them, she couldn't look away anymore. They were so different, different sizes, different styles, different colors. Some where lively, as if only frozen in mid-movement for a brief moment, others were dark like stormy nights, or variations of one shade, all sepia, all grey.

She frowned. Tried to find out why they would have been thrown together like this, what was common to them, how they harmonized. Because that they did, in a way.

"The one in the middle," Carlisle said softly. A rather large painting, light browns and oranges and yellows. Like the beginnings of a sunset.

"17th century London," he explained, then pointed at a building in the left half of the picture. "Look at that little tower. I remember someone coming to my parents' house complaining about how the workers who built that tower were always blocking the alley with their carts. It was just a couple of weeks before they were finished, though.

I probably remember that because it was the day I was changed. It's pretty much my last human memory." He pursed his lips and seemed lost in thought for a brief moment. "You'd think there would have been other things more worthy to be remembered."

Esme felt confused. She started doing calculations again. 1920, 1820, 1720, 1620. My gosh. What was he telling her?

"Why did your father build a cross?" She almost frowned at the question herself. _What?_

There was something to the small smile he gave her, glancing at her before he answered, that told her he knew exactly what she was thinking. That made her almost frown again.  
"He was a pastor," Carlisle explained, and then the smile vanished. "And a vampire hunter. Who believed in the myths."

"A vampire hunter?" Esme repeated. She hadn't expected that. Again, a smile. Completely different this time. No hint of amusement. It sat on his lips and fought not to slip off, while it tried to find out whether it was a little bitter or just sad.

_Sad_, Esme helped out. Bitter didn't fit him.

"Many of those things – the myths that people only dismiss as superstition today – were a lot realer then than they are now," Carlisle explained. "And this one – ours – at least, is somewhat true after all."

His forehead creased as he stared at the small tower he had pointed out to her before. "My father had many innocent people killed. I contemplated searching him out after I was changed. So he'd kill me, too. Until I realized that he couldn't have. Holy water and a peg of wood …," he hesitated, a rare trace of sarcasm in his voice. "That only works on humans. And I probably … I surely would have killed him first."

"You don't kill humans," Esme put in, a strange little shiver shaking the rushed words. They were a hidden question – _Why should you have?_ – as well as a demand. If she had to be in this existence, she wanted it to be true that she didn't have to be evil.

For a moment, there was silence. A hard-to-interpret smile fluttered about Carlisle's lips, trembling almost as much as Esme's words. All the things she didn't know yet. All the tests she'd yet have to master.

"No," he agreed at length. "But I had to learn how not to do that first." He inclined his head to one side slightly, looking both a little troubled and amused. "I doubt that my father was still alive by the time I had myself under control."

Rightly, she had a feeling like they were touching on something deep and far reaching, a dark lake lapping at her bare feet, wanting to be fathomed by her and making it very clear that she would have to do that eventually, whether she wanted or not.

For now, she'd had enough of cold water, though. And instead released a question that had been urging to be asked since he had told her about the origin of the cross on the landing outside: "When were you born?"

"I don't know exactly. The 1620s."

"My God!" It escaped her in a gasp, faster than she could react. "The entire world has changed since then." _We don't age_, she heard him say again in her mind. Immortal. _Yes, but._

Carlisle shrugged her words away gently. "Several times. It's not so hard to adjust for us."

She looked at him, still caught somewhere between disbelief, confusion and an odd kind of fear she couldn't quite place.

"How old were you when –," she asked, to disperse those feelings, and still half elsewhere while she spoke, stumbled over a lack of right words.

Carlisle helped her out with a smile and simply said: "Twenty-three."

She considered that for a moment. "Were you married?"

He gave her a funny look, something between amusement and surprise at the question. _I know,_ she thought. _I'm not sure why I'm asking all of this, either._ She decided to explain herself instead of telling him that: "Twenty-three wasn't as young then as it is now, was it?"

Carlisle smiled. "Not young at all," he agreed, and then answered her question: "I was engaged."

"Did you love her?" Another one of those. This time, he didn't look at her funnily, though. He looked thoughtful, and serious. "I hope so." Then his gaze slipped off her like water off a glass sculpture. "And I hope she didn't love me." Esme frowned, but before she could say anything, he continued: "All I remember about her is that she had blue eyes." – "What color were your eyes?" - "I don't remember." She looks at him disturbed about the idea of forgetting practically everything. "If you ever forget the color of your eyes, though, you can ask me."

She slowly nodded, as if the color of her eyes mattered to her at all.

"But not about the other things," she said quietly. "Not about Daniel." Her eyes were almost frightened. Pained again.

"No," Carlisle replied. "But you won't forget him."

Her eyes narrowed, close to tears if she had any. "How do you know?" Her voice was quiet and frail, like a small bird caught in the snow.

Carlisle slowly shook his head. "You won't."

And why did he sound so confident? He didn't know her. Or her memories.

She took a deep breath. And decided to hope that he was right. After all, what else could she do?

"How was it?" she asked after another moment. "London at that time?"

Carlisle pursed his lips. "You should have Edward tell you that," he replied. "He knows it all as well as I do by now, and he's a far better storyteller than I am." He smiled at her. "But I'll try."

He began talking, with his velvety voice, and with the name of Queen Elizabeth dropping from his lips and being breathed in by the painted London, Esme could feel a classroom set itself up around herself. She could hear the shuffling feet, the breathless giggles and the hush-hushes. She smelled the whiff of cool air that the children had brought in with them from their break, the chalk on her fingertips and the leaves of just-about outdated books.

She could hear her own voice, punctuated with the click-clack of her writing on the blackboard, softened by the chalk-dust that rippled from her elegant letters and settled on the spoken words. _1666, the Great Fire of London, _she told her pupils. _1789 to 99, the French Revolution. Do you remember who was king of France when it began? The 1660s, the Restoration. Who was Oliver Cromwell?_

She touched her fingers to the hilly blacks, browns and dark reds in the corner of one painting.

_What did Isaac Newton do? What happened in 1776? And do you know what the American Civil War was about? _

"Esme?"

She tumbled from the classroom into the study and looked at him. For a moment, she tried to find all of it – all of the huge chunk of history, from the beginnings of the 17th century right up to now, heartbeat after the World War – in his eyes.

But couldn't find it, because he was smiling. The smile pushed everything else away, left no room for wars and revolutions.

"What?" she asked reflexively.

"What are you thinking about? You're not listening at all, are you?" He said with all of the smile in his voice, as if her distraction pleased him.

She was quiet for a moment, then she answered: "I used to teach history." She looked back at the paintings. "This is odd," she said quietly, then suddenly she pressed her fingertips so hard against the street corner they were still touching as if she wanted to tear through the canvas and get drawn into the story behind it, the time and place.

She frowned. "How do you _do_ this?" she asked, desperate. Once more, she pressed against the hard paint and realized she wasn't trying to be pulled in, she was trying to pull out the pain that had been there in the last three centuries with their wars, the dying and the hundreds of kinds of losses, and absorb it so she would know that her pain wasn't the only in the world.

But it didn't work. The stories stayed in the pictures, dead like the people who had lived them, suffused with oil paint and quietness. It was all dead to her.

Not to Carlisle. He must have seen it all with those compassionate eyes of his, felt it all, and remember it as clearly as if it were happening now, just beyond this room.

What with these precise memories that an immortal mind seemed to keep.

She frowned and pushed the thought away, not even knowing why exactly she felt she needed to do so.

"You get used to it", Carlisle answered her question, making her blink a few times. _To what?_ she wondered, and tried to backtrack her thoughts to the point where she must have asked him something. _Oh_, she thought. _That._ She believed it better to shove that away, too.

It was all a little staggering to her. The dates, the idea of watching things pass by like someone in a theatre audience, unaffected by the play and time just another prop on the stage.

"What is this?" she asked, to distract herself, pointing at an image she couldn't place.

They moved from one painting to the next for another little while, and Esme didn't really notice becoming comfortable in this quiet room, in front of this wall of history, in Carlisle's presence, otherwise she would have fought the feeling.

Her hair dried, curling itself gently, back into the familiar caramel waves, and the wood-whisper-laced warmth seeped into her like the rainy coldness had before, replacing it bit by bit. She forgot all about the forest and its edge.

After a while, Edward came wandering in and just listened for a few minutes, before he began commenting on Carlisle's stories as if he had been there, too. It would have been a lie to say they weren't both getting a little silly eventually.

"I've been trying to convince Carlisle to write a book," Edward explained to Esme at one point. "17th century to the present, from a contemporary witness. We could uncover all the misconceptions and mistakes in the common history books."

Esme, still half facing the history mosaic, turned to look at Carlisle. He had gone to sit behind his desk a couple of minutes into the good-natured banter with Edward, who was leaning casually against one of the floor to ceiling bookshelves, arms crossed in front of his chest.

"Are there?" she asked the doctor. "Things that were different from how we believe?"

Carlisle smiled, throwing Edward a look that could have been anything from admonishment to amusement. Probably both and something in between as well.

"I don't know", he replied. "I mostly was at only one place at a time as well, rarely any place of political importance."

Edward shrugged. "I still think it would be a bestseller."

Despite herself, despite everything, Esme had to laugh. It felt strange, so she stopped again quickly.

It made Carlisle glance at her, though, and she could for nothing fathom the look he gave her. It, too, was short, and he was looking at Edward again before she knew it.

"That book would have to be one work of fiction indeed," he said with a smirk. "Made-up witnessed and manufactured evidence. Unless, of course, you want Aro down our throats."

Edward grimaced. "No," he said, "not necessarily." He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then he began to laugh. Esme almost frowned, until she remembered his strange talent.

She quickly turned around to face the pictures again. Layers of paint, colors, mixing, clashing and harmonizing, lying tranquilly next to each other or tumbling all over one another, and somehow creating things recognizable to the eye. A canvas and paint.

So much less complicated than mind-reading. And just as disturbing, as it had turned out.

They looked back at her, challenge glinting in their eyes. _So?_ they asked. _What do you think? Quite a collection, aren't we?_

_Yes,_ Esme thought. Quite a collection. Quite a collection of things that had made up her history lessons at school. Wars and dark times and breathing pauses.

A three-century tightrope populated with all of that. And on one side, this place. An autumn day, 1921, Ashland, a room full of books and paintings, whispering wood and rain.

On the other side, London, before myths were myths, before the name Wisconsin signified anything, before wars spanned the world. Tower builders that caused dismay and a blue-eyed girl.

Yes, it all disturbed her quite a bit. Took away, a little bit, the breath she didn't need anymore.

So she turned away from the paintings as well. _Where to?_

Carlisle and Edward were still talking, but she didn't catch the words. If Edward was paying attention to her jumbled thoughts, he didn't show it. He seemed to be describing something that required a lot of gesturing. Carlisle watched him with amused eyes, then he began to laugh.

It drew Esme in completely, all of a sudden.

After three hundred years of this world, she thought, how could he still be smiling all the time?

_TBC_


End file.
